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Archive for October 19th, 2009


Posted on October 19, 2009 - by jono

Failure as a Springboard to Success

Those lovely people at ZDNet have let me write a guest post about community, and I have contributed an article called Failure as a springboard to success.

The article talks about how if we embrace our failures in our communities, it can help us become better community members, and provides a model for doing so. This is particularly important for leaders. In a nutshell (from the article):

Failure should [also] be embraced in your communities. We admire leaders who are humble, honest and frank, and we grumble about leaders who are defensive and abrasive. Be the former, and your community will love you for it.

If you are involved in a community, I recommend you give it a read. :-)


Posted on October 19, 2009 - by jono

Announcing Shot Of Jaq

Some of you will know Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge. He was one of my fellow presenters on LugRadio, a show that we did that took a loose, informal and irreverent take on Open Source and Technology. He was the other longest standing presenter on the show which lasted four years and had over 2million downloads. We wrapped the show up in the middle of 2008.

LugRadio was a huge fun, but we wrapped it up because we felt that it had reached the end of it’s natural life. All four of us were conscious to not flog the ‘ol proverbial dead horse, so we wanted to go out while we felt show was on a high. While none of us have looked back, Aq and I have both talked about how LugRadio has left a gaping vacuum in our lives, but we were conscious to not resurrect the show for all the reasons I have just shared.

So, today Aq and I are announcing our new podcast Shot Of Jaq, and we are both rather excited about it. Many of you are likely to draw parallels to it and LugRadio, and while there is undoubtedly a LugRadio vibe there with us both being on the show, I wanted to clarify that it is not LugRadio 2.0 due to some key differences.

Shot Of Jaq is going to be something of an experiment. It is a new type of show, at least for us, and the first time we have both done a format such as this.

This is how it works. Aq and I are going to record a series of bite-sized shows which we are referring to as shots. Each shot will be about 10 minutes long and cover a given topic. We will release each shot at www.shotofjaq.org where you can listen to the juicy nugget of fun right from your web browser or alternatively, download the show in MP3 and Ogg format. We will also have podcast feeds.

A key part of Shot Of Jaq will be encouraging discussion when a show is released. With LugRadio we did this by releasing a show and creating a thread on the LugRadio Forums, and the community would discuss the topics there. With Shot Of Jaq, the discussion takes place right there on the website where you can listen to and download the show. This makes it a doddle to listen to the show and get involved in the discussion.

We have already recorded a few shots and aside from the different format, Shot Of Jaq differs to LugRadio a little in terms of feel too. It still focuses on frank, honest and entertainment-infused content, but it feels fuller in terms of material and focus. When we did LugRadio it was based on the kind of the discussions we had in the pub, and Shot Of Jaq is a bit more journalistic. As I said earlier, this is still something of an experiment and if you compare and contrast LugRadio Season 1 Episode 1 with the last studio show we did, we did a lot of learning and made a lot of changes to refine the show. This is almost certainly going to happen with Shot Of Jaq, and who knows what kind of changes we will make. Then again, friends, that there, is the nature of experimentation. :-)

The countdown has begun at www.shotofjaq.org and you will be able to hear our pilot show on Tuesday 3rd November 2009.

In the meantime, follow the show on Twitter and identi.ca and join the #shotofjaq IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.


Posted on October 19, 2009 - by jono

Ubuntu And The Opportunistic Programmer

Today I wanted to talk a little about how Ubuntu and its underlying platform comprised of many upstream components is opening up tremendous possibilities for the opportunistic programmer.

I am by definition an opportunistic programmer, and many Open Source folks are too. As an example, I bought an Amazon Kindle and wanted a simple GUI front-end for it. I had an itch and wanted to scratch it, so I wrote a little tool and shared it with the community. In the past I have also written tools to combine slides and audio from a talk into a Flash presentation, a front-end for an iRiver audio player and other things. Whether these tools, a game, a front-end for posting blog entries, a place to browse restaurants, a guitar tuner, or anything else, opportunistic programmers tend to write small tools that satisfy their needs and share them. This is one of the many reasons I love free software: opportunistic programmers are enabled.

In Ubuntu we ship a collection of upstream technologies and frameworks that offer a phenomenal platform for application development. These include tools to build rich graphical desktop applications and support for managing devices, networking, complex multimedia creation/playback/streaming, scalable vector graphics, accessibility, translations and more. An awesome platform, yes, and do you know what makes it even more awesome? The whole shebang can be utilized using the simple, elegant and extensible high-level Python language.

Even with the power and glory that is Python, it was still at best a faff and at worst a nightmare to get up and running. Not only is the programmer faced with the obvious need to learn the platform, but they are faced with all the other fluff such as managing builds, version control, packaging, coordinating contributions, applying appropriate licensing and more. Many moons ago when I started to learn the platform, it felt like all the bits were there, but that some magic was needed to know how they all connected together.

Fortunately, this is an area which is continuing to get easier and easier. Not only are upstream GNOME, PyGTK, GStreamer, Cairo, Glade etc making the platform much easier to work with, but in the Ubuntu project we are really keen to get opportunistic programmers up and running ASAP. One of the areas that this has manifested itself is in Quickly; a tool that makes getting a new desktop Python application up and running really easily.

Quickly provides a devilishly simple means to generate an app, edit the code, change Glade files, commit to a Launchpad project, make releases and package and release your application. It was created by Rick Spencer and Didier Roche. Quickly is a great way to harness this phenomenal development platform built right into Ubuntu. Didier, being the absolutely rockstar that he is, wrote a series of tutorials about how to get started with Quickly here:

While Quickly is incredible in providing a great means of getting you up and running with this platform, there are many other tools which make writing any kind of application you want to easier. This includes collaborating on your projects in Launchpad, using bug tracking, managing specifications, hosting code and merging in contributions, working on translations, and providing a place to publish your releases to Ubuntu.

Not only does the up-coming Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, released on Thu 29th October 2009 bring this rich platform, as well as Quickly, but it also bring the new Ubuntu Software Center which provides a refreshed means of browsing and installing applications. My hope is that we will continue to leverage this rock-solid platform and be able to have opportunistic programmers everywhere be able to get their apps in front of Ubuntu users, in much the same way the iPhone and Android Market Place does so.

I would love to encourage you all to run through the Quickly tutorial above and blog and share about your experience. If you make a cool new app, do let me know!